Months out from the Netherlands’ April 2026 approval of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) system, Dutch regulator RDW has refused to disclose why it concluded the system is safe or how it was tested—even as it pushes for EU-wide adoption. Emails obtained by Reuters show the automaker has pressed the regulator to keep that documentation confidential since late 2024, citing trade secrets in precisely the same manner it did with the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

RDW has echoed the wording of Tesla’s confidentiality demands almost verbatim, telling Reuters that releasing testing details would expose the company’s commercial secrets. It has not explained what about the testing process or its conclusions is commercially sensitive. In one exchange from April 2025, a Tesla representative asked the regulator to confirm it would “never” release a particular document—the details of which are not clear—and pressed for assurances on how disclosure would be prevented.

Tesla’s record for secrecy, particularly around the details and safety record of its self-driving technology, is well-established. A separate Reuters investigation from May found that the automaker’s self-published FSD statistics are significantly inflated, and the outlet separately reported in June that Tesla had shared the same US data with several EU regulators, including RDW, during its approval push. 

RDW maintains that it disregarded Tesla’s figures and ran its own closed-track and public-road testing instead, though it will not say how it measured performance or reached its conclusions. Tesla has also endeavoured to withhold crash data surrounding incidents with its Austin robotaxi service since it went live in June 2025, again citing confidentiality. The automaker has fought Freedom of Information Act requests over US crash data on similar competitive-harm grounds, and it remains the only self-driving operator in the NHTSA database which redacts crash-report narratives entirely.

Norway’s Public Roads Administration, which reviewed the data shared by the Dutch, told drivers directly that the information “is not the same as what Tesla publishes on its website”—implicitly confirming that Tesla’s public marketing overstates what regulators have actually verified. Germany, Denmark and four other European countries have all separately told Reuters they cannot release FSD testing data either, citing the same trade-secret concerns RDW has raised.

The confidentiality dispute matters more than usual because of how Tesla is trying to secure approval for FSD across the bloc. Current EU rules only permit hands-free automated systems like FSD on highways, explicitly barring their use on congested urban roads, so Tesla is pursuing a special exemption from those restrictions rather than compliance with them. RDW is again, without apparent reason, endeavouring to see the automaker gain full EU-wide approval. However, this requires support from countries representing 55% of member states and 65% of the bloc’s population. A vote on approval could happen as early as October.

Belgium became the fifth EU state to approve FSD in June, following the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia and Denmark, but all five are smaller or mid-sized markets. Germany, France and Italy each hold effective veto power under the Commission’s thresholds, and each has separately raised concerns about whether FSD’s US-trained data applies well to European cyclists, motorcyclists and dense urban roads.

RDW’s opaque approval may carry real weight with smaller states willing to recognise it directly, but it is unlikely to be as convincing in Brussels, and the countries able to decide the EU-wide vote have already flagged the exact gaps in evidence this secrecy prevents anyone from examining.